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Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine

119 points by timknauf 15y ago

tobiasu 15y ago
Hmm, what's so amazing about it? It's a voxel graphic engine, of course it's going to have great detail and no polygons (duh). That's not new. Commanche had this in 1992... I'm not at all an expert in this area, can someone who is explain what the downsides of voxel graphics are? There must be some serious problems with it, because the technology is well known. Is there something new that makes this particular engine stand out above the previous engines?
- baby 15y ago
  notch posted something about downsides of voxel. Like you can't see the same object from different angles, you have a hard time animating things...
  - timknauf 15y ago
    I can see how animations might be difficult, depending on what sort of data structure one uses to store the voxel data. But why would you not be able to see the same object from different angles?
    - wladimir 15y ago
      I think he means that you cannot rotate an object and keep it aligned to the voxel grid at the same time. It would be a lossy operation, and require interpolation, just like rotating an image on a 2D grid.
      - roel_v 15y ago
        But if the resolution of your grid is smaller than the size of the voxel, that wouldn't matter much - and you could keep rounding errors in check by anchoring larger units of voxels at a certain location in space. I can see the drawbacks of the voxel cloud approach (requires much memory, what algorithm is fast enough to do voxel culling on such a massive amount of data, what about animation) but the 'can't do rotation' doesn't seem like a particularly strong argument (unless I'm misunderstanding the actual argument, which is very well possible...)
        ajuc 15y ago
        Rotatin (in general - transforming) voxels in real time is difficult compared to polygons, because with polygons you only transform vertices, and in voxels you have to transform every voxel. EDIT: If you are spekaing about preprocessing data - yes - you can rotate as much as you want, the only problem will be that object instanced 1000 times with different orientation/scale will take 1000 times more memory than object instanced 1000 times with the same orientation/scale. With polygons there is no difference.
        roel_v 15y ago
        Sorry, by 'preprocessing' I meant things still done on each frame, but anything that is not raw pushing-vertices-into-the-gpu-pipeline, i.e. all polygon culling, LoD simplification etc. But yeah, the amount of data you'd have to work on would be much greater, but the way I interpret all of this is that he's found algos to do that very fast, regardless of whether it's a lot of data.
        wladimir 15y ago
        I'm not saying it is entirely impossible. However, rotating volume data (which voxels are) is computationally a lot more intensive. With polygonal objects you can just change the transformation matrix and re-render the screen and you're done. At most, you have to deform the vertices that make up the outer shell of the object to do things like make a person walk. With voxels, you'd have to recompute all the voxels of the object on a 3d grid. Also there are issues with ragged boundaries, which can be prevented by using antialiasing, but which is probably trickier (=more computationally intensive) than in 2D...
        roel_v 15y ago
        I'm still not convinced by these arguments ;) The displacement of the voxels can also be done with a simple matrix transformation, as far as I see it; same like you'd do for the nodes in a 3d model, same as you'd do it with a 'traditional' 3d pipeline (OpenGL/DirectX) - unless I'm behind the curve and animation itself is done on the GPU nowadays, but I don't think it is. Ragged boundaries wouldn't be an issue as long as there are enough voxels. What I understand, that's the whole point - you just have lots and lots of voxels, at a much finer resolution than you'd ever want to render at, so that you just (by brute force) render once without having to worry about anti-aliasing, gaps between planes etc.
- Fargren 15y ago
  I think the big deal is that it's supposed to convert poligon based graphics to voxels in real time. Which I doubt it can actually do, but if it can, it would be kind of cool.
  - timknauf 15y ago
    Their polygon-to-voxel technology is a sideline, I believe, and it doesn't sound like it's realtime.
  - stefs 15y ago
    the polygon to voxel conversion is just so artists can use existing tools like 3dmax or maya, which work on polygon models. think of the trees in their demo, the models have to come from somewhere. so realtime conversion is not needed. as far as i can tell their voxel tech is just for non-moving objects like the landscape, buildings, etc. animated and moving actors are still rendered as polygons and blended into the scene (according to the article, this already works to a certain degree, but they weren't able to give a live demo, just a video).
- jawngee 15y ago
  Comanche had shitty detail, as did all the games that came after (Delta Force, etc.) that used the same engine. With this you can zoom down to the pebble. Supposing this is legit, I'm cautiously optimistic, homie has probably uncovered some very novel techniques that allow the granular level of detail you couldn't do before with voxels, with optimizations that don't require GPU .. this is pretty amazing.
  - ctdonath 15y ago
    Comanche had shitty detail because it was running on 19 year old hardware. Scale that up 10,000x and refine the algorithms over a couple decades and Dell's demo is the logical result.
    - jawngee 15y ago
      Well, see above, it actually wasn't true voxels in this sense.
- timknauf 15y ago
  I think the big deal is supposed to be the incredible level of detail apparently achieved without being all that taxing on the hardware (though the jury is out on whether it's some sort of trickery - it sounds too good to be true). Edit: They claim in the article to have devised an approach that no-one else has come up with, and they give this as the reason why no-one else is doing something similar.
- mjhall 15y ago
  I think the major downside is the world is immutable. For the search algorithm to run in short enough times to render in real time the point cloud needs to be organised very carefully. Part of the point cloud needs to move for animation, which involves re-indexing at least part of the world. Doing this once per frame is probably far too expensive (at least currently), which is why animation doesn't feature in their videos. That doesn't mean this technology should be dismissed; most world data in 3D scene graphs is static, so it does have applications. I don't see it overtaking rasterised graphics entirely, but I think there is value in it. I'm not an expert either, so take my comment with a healthy bucket of salt.
- gizmo 15y ago
  The big downside is that you have no idea ahead of time what parts end up on screen and which parts don't. With a voxel engine you create a giant tree that allows you to do a quick logarithmic lookup to a voxel for every pixel on the screen (more or less). Suppose you're standing on a hill and look down on the valley below. If the terrain and world below is created by artists and contains many unique objects then you end up with a voxel tree that's terabytes large. You can't keep it in memory, so performance will be awful. The only way (afaik) to keep the memory usage in check is to force reuse everywhere. So you then create ultra high resolution models of 100 different bricks and mortar. The artist then composes those "lego pieces" into different buildings. That would work, but then everything is going to look very repetitive again (which brings us back to square one). Then of course there are the problems with lighting, animation and so on.
  - modeless 15y ago
    It's actually the reverse! Voxels make it easy to figure out what's on screen and what's not. That's their main advantage over polygons. The main disadvantage is that they are generally slower to render, but as you add more details, polygon renderers waste time on details that are far away or off screen while voxel renderers can discard those more easily, and eventually there's a tipping point. You're right that lighting and animation are real problems with voxels. Animation in particular is pretty much impossible, which means you have to fall back to polygons for anything that moves or changes, which in modern games is a lot of stuff.
    - gizmo 15y ago
      > It's actually the reverse! Voxels make it easy to figure out what's on screen and what's not. No no, I explicitly said "ahead of time". It's easy to determine what's on screen when you're about to render the frame, but you have to load every single object in memory because every single object is a "candidate" that may end up on the screen, you just don't know ahead of time. You can't cull the voxel tree, even though 99% of the voxel tree won't be used when rending a frame. So the memory overhead is immense. Voxel trees don't make it easy to discard things that are far away at all, because there aren't any low-resolution objects that you can use for far-away objects. You have to load many objects in memory even when you use them to render just a pixel or two. The polygon-based worlds we have today use various low-resolution models for when you view at a distance, and as you get closer the higher resolution models "pop in". This tech advertises that you have infinite detail and that there's no need for objects with different level of detail. This means that the complete point cloud of every object has to be loaded in memory and that's a very real problem and it's in complete contradiction to the claims made by the company that artists can create infinitely detailed worlds without having to worry about vertex counts or whatever. Artists have to compose their world out of re-usable high-detail objects or the sparse voxel octree will be way too large. This means the artists will be much more constrained than they are today, not less.
- mambodog 15y ago
  To be accurate, Commanche didn't have a true volumetric renderer, it was just raycasting a heightmap[1]; essentially just as much of a hollow shell as polygon rendering techniques. However, you are correct to point out that this tech is not particularly revolutionary; others such as the Atomontage engine[2] show voxels can be leveraged to create detailed, destructible organic environments. [1] http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Realtime_Voxel_Landscape_Engines-Part_2_Rendering_the_Landscapes_Structure.shtml http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Realtime_Voxel_Landscape_En... [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CCZIBDt1uM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CCZIBDt1uM
baby 15y ago
way to write a lot about it without really talking about it... tl;dr anyone?
- stefs 15y ago
  tl;dr: i'm sceptical, this might be snake oil, omgthisisthegreatestthingeverandwillrevolutionizeeverything! honestly, the article is not of the highest quality.
Cyph0n 15y ago
Interesting article. Judging by Dell's (the CEO) calm attitude towards "haters", I personally believe that he truly has something revolutionary to offer. Only time will tell though.
- Causification 15y ago
  How so? His claims that "We could call notch out and prove that he's a total incompetent in a bunch of areas but we want to be nice to him" manages to deeply insult notch without actually making any technical claims that could be disproven by a third party. It's a total weasel move.
- pavlov 15y ago
  How is that indicative of anything but a thought-out publicity strategy? If one were in the perpetual-motion machine business, taking a calm attitude towards haters would be pretty much the only option, since there would be no way to argue with them.
  - marshray 15y ago
    ... and if he were not in the perpetual-motion machine business taking a calm attitude wouldn't be a bad idea either. So logically it's not a very informative data point. Nevertheless, I did watch him interviewed and give the real-time interactivity demo to an AU gamer mag a few months ago (I think it's still on Youtube). I know a bit about the traditional polygon rendering pipeline and I was quite impressed with his response to his critics. I'm reserving judgment since there are still big unanswered questions. But I would not expect him to be satisfying my curiosity with answers if his strategy is a legitimate attempt to develop the technology with a bigger partner (e.g. a console company or first-party studio).
    - unconed 15y ago
      As someone who knows more than 'a bit', I can tell you, it smells like snake oil from miles away. All the obvious signs are there: needlessly bashing existing tech, handwaving around very hard problems and demo videos that are staged to hide the obvious flaws from the untrained eye. Plus, they've been hyping up the same tech for years now, with very little progress. People keep throwing the same criticisms at them, and they keep delivering very unimpressive responses. If they've indeed scored $2 million of government grants already with this demo, as others allege, then it couldn't be more obvious: it's a zombie company designed to look impressive and leech off investor money, nothing more. It's centered around tech that has already been explored thoroughly by academia and industry, and we know where the practical problems lie in turning it into a viable game tech.
wladimir 15y ago
See also the gigavoxel research by an ex-colleague of mine: http://maverick.inria.fr/Members/Cyril.Crassin/ http://maverick.inria.fr/Members/Cyril.Crassin/ . This looks very similar, and is probably an extension of it...
babebridou 15y ago
What I don't like with "Unlimited Details" is that Dell refuses to say what the engine can't do yet. We know it's a work in progress. We (the internet) are excited about it because it's an experiment that's on scale with what we could expect from that branch of 3D graphics technology. Trillions of atoms, whatever. Show us what's still in progress because the internet is skeptical about this, this and this. Hacking reflexion by duplicating the scene is a good way to start, because no one can say whether it's a good or a bad solution to a non-trivial problem - it gets the job done for now - but can you have multiple coexisting versions of the world? like a vertical mirror, a horizontal body of water and an underwater section? To Dell: just stop handwaving the questions already, we get it that you ignored the state of the art and built your own thing, just tell us what it can't do yet, show us your current progress and you'll be met with much less skepticism, and even help, even if you keep your trade secrets, at least show us your specs! You won't be struck down by lightning if you talk - no one ever died from reinventing/copying the wheel and making it so good that the wheel can fly.
- Torn 15y ago
  > Dell refuses to say what the engine can't do yet. I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest it can't do real-time animation, texturing, lighting, shadows, collisions, etc. All the maps / screenshots shown seem to be static, procedurally generated and not artist-created. Dell keeps throwing around this 'Unlimited Detail' marketing phrase which is very offputting. Until it's seen in action in an actual game it can be nothing but snake oil.
  - babebridou 15y ago
    I agree with you 100% - my comment was mostly wishful thinking, a description of how Dell could make me change my mind. This kind of marketing is one I can't quite understand. I mean, what is he after? Buzz? Funding? What's his endgame? Why & how is he paying people to work on it? Is his marketing strategy to troll the profession & the audience, and he really has something big up his sleeve? Why is he using the Vaporware approach?
    - 15y ago
nodata 15y ago
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2837948 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2837948 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840543 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840543
Causification 15y ago
The way the author posted the picture (used in a much earlier Euclideon article talking about how badly polygon engines render complex organic shapes) of a polygon tree and a PHOTOGRAPH of a real tree and passed it off as the Unlimited Detail Engine makes me question his bias. The way he used "Kuda" when talking about CUDA makes me question his technical competency. Until there's a demo I can download and run on my PC it's a load of baseless claims as far as I'm concerned.
darklajid 15y ago
Is something like "GPUs used to be fighting one another for more power, memory, and so forth, but now they have their languages like _Kuda_" (Page 6) just a random typo or a reason to believe that someone didn't do his homework before typing this down? I'd love to see this released, but the article was far too positive and the tone read too much like marketing to me. Some careful, not too aggressive words at the introduction and blessing after blessing afterwards, sprinkled with the seemingly unbiased author's impression and description of a very nice and professional guy. Mhhhh... Edit: Just saw that user 'Causification' already said something similar, albeit with a good amount of more emotion. Still, I'm going to keep this here as a personal impression of someone that has no clue about graphic engines in general, i.e. my layman's reaction after reading the article.
- robinhouston 15y ago
  Those of us who don’t keep showdead turned on can’t see what Causification has said, because he/she is hellbanned. I was quite confused by your comment, till I guessed what had happened and turned on showdead to check.
singular 15y ago
Whether or not a voxel engine is the right way go, or even whether it does what it claims to do, I think Dell should be commended for actually going out and trying to do the thing - it's an amazing achievement to actually get somewhere with it.
femto 15y ago
What do people make of the patent history? Eight lapsed applications and one withdrawn over a 15 year period. Is that unusual? http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/quickSearch.do?queryString=bruce+dell&resultsPerPage= http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/quickSearch.do...
forbes 15y ago
The awesome Aussie show 'Good Game' did a story on Unlimited Detail recently: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?src=/tv/goodgame/video/xml/20111108_2030.xml&item=05 http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?src=/tv/...
Derbasti 15y ago
As soon as I see animated objects moving about in a dynamically lit world, I will start to believe that Euclideon is on to something. Maybe there could be some middle ground like in the old voxel days, where you would have a static (unlimited detail) background world and some traditional, polygon-based actors in the foreground. Looking at any modern game, just about everything on the screen is constantly moving, so color me sceptical even on that idea. Also, I would like to know how they do lighting. It looks like they might use precomputed highlights and shadows. Needless to say that this would not be of much use for dynamic lighting.
- wingerlang 15y ago
  Not sure if you want to SEE it. But in the article it says they are doing just that. . "Dell shows me an as yet unreleased demo – not real-time in this case – that suggests Euclideon has already made some positive inroads in ensuring Unlimited Detail is compatible with existing middleware. The short video shows traditional polygon objects happily coexisting and interacting in the same space as a small Unlimited Detail environment"
- epscylonb 15y ago
  Collision detection is the big thing for me, sure you can fake it with invisible polygons but that usually leads to weirdness in the player experience.
- dmbaggett 15y ago
  This may not be as big an issue as you think. We had the same issue in in the Crash Bandicoot games: the background was rendered a completely different way than the foreground (animating) elements. We made it work by approximating where the foreground elements should "sort in" to the background polygon layers. Where the heuristics were wrong, we tuned it manually, by pushing a foreground element forward or backward in the scene until it looked right. Remember: you can hack stuff in games until it looks right. It doesn't actually have to work perfectly from a theoretical standpoint; it just has to work practically without too much additional tuning labor.
  - 15y ago
dmbaggett 15y ago
The article sensationally positions this as some incredible breakthrough that the "old guard" of gaming is trying to suppress. More likely, the code works, but has limitations -- the same limitations that led old guard luminaries like Carmack to defer the idea for another few years. As others have pointed out, voxel-based games have been around for a long time; a recent example is the whimsical "3D Dot Game Hero" for PS3, in which they use the low-res nature of the voxel world as a fun design element. Voxel-based approaches have huge advantages ("infinite" detail, background details that are deformable at the pixel level, simpler simulation of particle-based phenomena like flowing water, etc.) but they'll only win once computing power reaches an important crossover point. That point is where rendering an organic world a voxel at a time looks better than rendering zillions of polygons to approximate an organic world. Furthermore, much of the effort that's gone into visually simulating real-world phenomena (read the last 30 years of Siggraph conference proceedings) will mostly have to be reapplied to voxel rendering. Simply put: lighting, caustics, organic elements like human faces and hair, etc. will have to be "figured out all over again" for the new era of voxel engines. It will therefore likely take a while for voxel approaches to produce results that look as good, even once the crossover point of level of detail is reached. I don't mean to take anything away from the hard and impressive coding work this team has done, but if they had more academic background, they'd know that much of what they've "pioneered" has been studied in tremendous detail for two decades. Hanan Samet's treatise on the subject tells you absolutely everything you need to know, and more: (http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Multidimensional-Structures-Kaufmann-Computer/dp/0123694469/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322140227&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Multidimensional-Structure...) and even goes into detail about the application of these spatial data structures to other areas like machine learning. Ultimately, Samet's book is all about the "curse of dimensionality" and how (and how much) data structures can help address it. In the late 90s at Naughty Dog, I used Samet's ideas (octrees in particular) for collision detection in the Crash Bandicoot games. In those games, the world was visually rendered with polygons, but physically modeled -- for collision detection purposes, at least -- with an octree. The nice thing about octrees is that they are very simple to work with and self-calibrate their resolution dynamically, making them very space-efficient. Intuitively, a big region of empty air tends to be represented by a handful of huge cubes, while the individual fronds of a fern get coated with dozens or hundreds of tiny cubes, because there's more surface detail to account for in the latter example. I think the crossover point I mentioned earlier will come when GPUs become general-purpose enough to allow massively parallel voxel rendering implementations. That's what surprised me most about this article: they crow that it's a CPU-only technology... why? GPUs excel at tasks involving vast amounts of relatively simple parallel computation. Prior to the crossover point, we'll see a bunch of cool games that use voxel rendering primarily for gameplay reasons. These games will look chunky compared to their polygonal peers, but will offer unique experiences. Minecraft is a good example. (I'm assuming it's voxel-based, but don't really know.)
Tloewald 15y ago
The fact they are financially backed by the Australian Government (which has an approximately 0% track record as a VC) seals their doom. If they were in the US they'd have to figure out a way to produce something commercial or at least potentially commercial, now they can burn through $2M while fading into irrelevance (if not there already).
sjm 15y ago
I'd really like to know how much memory is being used per unique model. Until we see more than a couple different models being re-used everywhere, I'm going to stay skeptical. Also his reasoning for the lack of variety of '3 weeks before Gamescom' sounds a bit BS to me, as this video has been around for much longer than Euclideon's last media-spree: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSvptZCJGyI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSvptZCJGyI. You would think they would have created at least one demo with a larger variety of objects by this point. I'm also very suspicious of all this recent positive coverage of Euclideon. There was a pretty suspect feature on Euclideon on an Australian game review show called Good Game a couple weeks back, talking with this same guy, and not really making much mention of the skepticism involved (or at all if I remember correctly), and as far as I know no outspoken skeptics have been able to get their hands on it. The clip from Good Game can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_ndZ8ETbqU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_ndZ8ETbqU
ldar15 15y ago
"... he was forced to solve the riddles himself, rather than plucking the accepted solution from a textbook ..." The thing is, the textbooks also have all the things that didn't work or don't work well. Even some educated graphics programmers often fail to understand that representing 3D objects is just a data representation and transformation problem. Sure, a hard one, but there's nothing magic about it. Representing the data as a bag of "atoms" instead of polygons just isn't a breakthrough. The problem is still spacial search. The problem is still a simulation of optical physics. Graphics is just an optimization problem now. Attend an IEEE conference and maybe 5% of papers will be new theory, the rest will be about effective optimization techniques. When someone comes to you and says "I have this awesome idea because I didn't read anybody else's ideas", just walk away.
tluyben2 15y ago
After reading all the comments it seems there are people who are playing with this kind of technology. Is there any open source code which can be studied?
meric 15y ago
There's supposed to be 42 trillion "voxels" in that demo. If each "voxel" took only a single bit to store, this works out to require [42 trillion / (1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8) = 4 889.44352] gigabytes of memory. How do you store that while you calculate the screen pixels? Modern PCs only have 4 or 8 gigabytes of RAM!
- jpadvo 15y ago
  This is addressed in the article: they used many replicated objects. They stored one rock, then rendered it a gajillion times. They claim they were able to do this by applying something like a search algorithm to the objects being rendered. That's the magic of it -- they are able to create worlds with insane amounts of detail, but in an intelligent way that means they don't need an insane amount of computational power to render it.
mkramlich 15y ago
Voxel engines are "new" in the same sense that social networks are "new" from the POV of someone who remembers using modem-based BBSes and Unix Usenet groups back in the 80's. Meaning: mostly old, maybe new in some small subtle corner aspect of it, or some twist. But not really new.
rkalla 15y ago
I am surprisd by the lack of interest in the search algorithm Dell proposes he designed and is using. Searching such a large problem space for 1 to 2 million results 25x a second is amazingly impressive... This is what i am most curious about at the moment... Also how he is storing the full voxel point data for any given world that needs to be searchd in real time. Replicated data or not (i.e. similar to GIF color data deduplication) you still have location data for every voxel position or offsets or something that still results in a hellacious amount of data that needs to be searched efficiently. Havent seen details from Dell or others on either of these aspects that I feel are cornerstones to the engine.
- buff-a 15y ago
  Its hierarchical data, most nodes of which are empty at the highest level, or 100% solid, terminating the search. Its basically a specific optimization of raytracing as far as I can tell.
argimenes 15y ago
If this software is a hoax -- and fair enough, it sounds too good to be true -- can someone explain how they were able to fake it in the live demo? I understand that this is supposed to be impossible, cranks often claim the establishment is 'suppressing' them, etc., etc., but if this snake oil peddling, then HOW did they do it? The demo LOOKS real.

119 points by timknauf 15y ago

Hmm, what's so amazing about it? It's a voxel graphic engine, of course it's going to have great detail and no polygons (duh). That's not new. Commanche had this in 1992... I'm not at all an expert in this area, can someone who is explain what the downsides of voxel graphics are? There must be some serious problems with it, because the technology is well known. Is there something new that makes this particular engine stand out above the previous engines?

baby 15y ago
notch posted something about downsides of voxel. Like you can't see the same object from different angles, you have a hard time animating things...
- timknauf 15y ago
  I can see how animations might be difficult, depending on what sort of data structure one uses to store the voxel data. But why would you not be able to see the same object from different angles?
  - wladimir 15y ago
    I think he means that you cannot rotate an object and keep it aligned to the voxel grid at the same time. It would be a lossy operation, and require interpolation, just like rotating an image on a 2D grid.
    - roel_v 15y ago
      But if the resolution of your grid is smaller than the size of the voxel, that wouldn't matter much - and you could keep rounding errors in check by anchoring larger units of voxels at a certain location in space. I can see the drawbacks of the voxel cloud approach (requires much memory, what algorithm is fast enough to do voxel culling on such a massive amount of data, what about animation) but the 'can't do rotation' doesn't seem like a particularly strong argument (unless I'm misunderstanding the actual argument, which is very well possible...)
      - ajuc 15y ago
        Rotatin (in general - transforming) voxels in real time is difficult compared to polygons, because with polygons you only transform vertices, and in voxels you have to transform every voxel. EDIT: If you are spekaing about preprocessing data - yes - you can rotate as much as you want, the only problem will be that object instanced 1000 times with different orientation/scale will take 1000 times more memory than object instanced 1000 times with the same orientation/scale. With polygons there is no difference.
        roel_v 15y ago
        Sorry, by 'preprocessing' I meant things still done on each frame, but anything that is not raw pushing-vertices-into-the-gpu-pipeline, i.e. all polygon culling, LoD simplification etc. But yeah, the amount of data you'd have to work on would be much greater, but the way I interpret all of this is that he's found algos to do that very fast, regardless of whether it's a lot of data.
      - wladimir 15y ago
        I'm not saying it is entirely impossible. However, rotating volume data (which voxels are) is computationally a lot more intensive. With polygonal objects you can just change the transformation matrix and re-render the screen and you're done. At most, you have to deform the vertices that make up the outer shell of the object to do things like make a person walk. With voxels, you'd have to recompute all the voxels of the object on a 3d grid. Also there are issues with ragged boundaries, which can be prevented by using antialiasing, but which is probably trickier (=more computationally intensive) than in 2D...
        roel_v 15y ago
        I'm still not convinced by these arguments ;) The displacement of the voxels can also be done with a simple matrix transformation, as far as I see it; same like you'd do for the nodes in a 3d model, same as you'd do it with a 'traditional' 3d pipeline (OpenGL/DirectX) - unless I'm behind the curve and animation itself is done on the GPU nowadays, but I don't think it is. Ragged boundaries wouldn't be an issue as long as there are enough voxels. What I understand, that's the whole point - you just have lots and lots of voxels, at a much finer resolution than you'd ever want to render at, so that you just (by brute force) render once without having to worry about anti-aliasing, gaps between planes etc.
Fargren 15y ago
I think the big deal is that it's supposed to convert poligon based graphics to voxels in real time. Which I doubt it can actually do, but if it can, it would be kind of cool.
- timknauf 15y ago
  Their polygon-to-voxel technology is a sideline, I believe, and it doesn't sound like it's realtime.
- stefs 15y ago
  the polygon to voxel conversion is just so artists can use existing tools like 3dmax or maya, which work on polygon models. think of the trees in their demo, the models have to come from somewhere. so realtime conversion is not needed. as far as i can tell their voxel tech is just for non-moving objects like the landscape, buildings, etc. animated and moving actors are still rendered as polygons and blended into the scene (according to the article, this already works to a certain degree, but they weren't able to give a live demo, just a video).
jawngee 15y ago
Comanche had shitty detail, as did all the games that came after (Delta Force, etc.) that used the same engine. With this you can zoom down to the pebble. Supposing this is legit, I'm cautiously optimistic, homie has probably uncovered some very novel techniques that allow the granular level of detail you couldn't do before with voxels, with optimizations that don't require GPU .. this is pretty amazing.
- ctdonath 15y ago
  Comanche had shitty detail because it was running on 19 year old hardware. Scale that up 10,000x and refine the algorithms over a couple decades and Dell's demo is the logical result.
  - jawngee 15y ago
    Well, see above, it actually wasn't true voxels in this sense.
timknauf 15y ago
I think the big deal is supposed to be the incredible level of detail apparently achieved without being all that taxing on the hardware (though the jury is out on whether it's some sort of trickery - it sounds too good to be true). Edit: They claim in the article to have devised an approach that no-one else has come up with, and they give this as the reason why no-one else is doing something similar.
mjhall 15y ago
I think the major downside is the world is immutable. For the search algorithm to run in short enough times to render in real time the point cloud needs to be organised very carefully. Part of the point cloud needs to move for animation, which involves re-indexing at least part of the world. Doing this once per frame is probably far too expensive (at least currently), which is why animation doesn't feature in their videos. That doesn't mean this technology should be dismissed; most world data in 3D scene graphs is static, so it does have applications. I don't see it overtaking rasterised graphics entirely, but I think there is value in it. I'm not an expert either, so take my comment with a healthy bucket of salt.
gizmo 15y ago
The big downside is that you have no idea ahead of time what parts end up on screen and which parts don't. With a voxel engine you create a giant tree that allows you to do a quick logarithmic lookup to a voxel for every pixel on the screen (more or less). Suppose you're standing on a hill and look down on the valley below. If the terrain and world below is created by artists and contains many unique objects then you end up with a voxel tree that's terabytes large. You can't keep it in memory, so performance will be awful. The only way (afaik) to keep the memory usage in check is to force reuse everywhere. So you then create ultra high resolution models of 100 different bricks and mortar. The artist then composes those "lego pieces" into different buildings. That would work, but then everything is going to look very repetitive again (which brings us back to square one). Then of course there are the problems with lighting, animation and so on.
- modeless 15y ago
  It's actually the reverse! Voxels make it easy to figure out what's on screen and what's not. That's their main advantage over polygons. The main disadvantage is that they are generally slower to render, but as you add more details, polygon renderers waste time on details that are far away or off screen while voxel renderers can discard those more easily, and eventually there's a tipping point. You're right that lighting and animation are real problems with voxels. Animation in particular is pretty much impossible, which means you have to fall back to polygons for anything that moves or changes, which in modern games is a lot of stuff.
  - gizmo 15y ago
    > It's actually the reverse! Voxels make it easy to figure out what's on screen and what's not. No no, I explicitly said "ahead of time". It's easy to determine what's on screen when you're about to render the frame, but you have to load every single object in memory because every single object is a "candidate" that may end up on the screen, you just don't know ahead of time. You can't cull the voxel tree, even though 99% of the voxel tree won't be used when rending a frame. So the memory overhead is immense. Voxel trees don't make it easy to discard things that are far away at all, because there aren't any low-resolution objects that you can use for far-away objects. You have to load many objects in memory even when you use them to render just a pixel or two. The polygon-based worlds we have today use various low-resolution models for when you view at a distance, and as you get closer the higher resolution models "pop in". This tech advertises that you have infinite detail and that there's no need for objects with different level of detail. This means that the complete point cloud of every object has to be loaded in memory and that's a very real problem and it's in complete contradiction to the claims made by the company that artists can create infinitely detailed worlds without having to worry about vertex counts or whatever. Artists have to compose their world out of re-usable high-detail objects or the sparse voxel octree will be way too large. This means the artists will be much more constrained than they are today, not less.
mambodog 15y ago
To be accurate, Commanche didn't have a true volumetric renderer, it was just raycasting a heightmap[1]; essentially just as much of a hollow shell as polygon rendering techniques. However, you are correct to point out that this tech is not particularly revolutionary; others such as the Atomontage engine[2] show voxels can be leveraged to create detailed, destructible organic environments. [1] http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Realtime_Voxel_Landscape_Engines-Part_2_Rendering_the_Landscapes_Structure.shtml http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Realtime_Voxel_Landscape_En... [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CCZIBDt1uM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CCZIBDt1uM

baby 15y ago

way to write a lot about it without really talking about it... tl;dr anyone?

stefs 15y ago
tl;dr: i'm sceptical, this might be snake oil, omgthisisthegreatestthingeverandwillrevolutionizeeverything! honestly, the article is not of the highest quality.

Cyph0n 15y ago

Interesting article. Judging by Dell's (the CEO) calm attitude towards "haters", I personally believe that he truly has something revolutionary to offer. Only time will tell though.

Causification 15y ago
How so? His claims that "We could call notch out and prove that he's a total incompetent in a bunch of areas but we want to be nice to him" manages to deeply insult notch without actually making any technical claims that could be disproven by a third party. It's a total weasel move.
pavlov 15y ago
How is that indicative of anything but a thought-out publicity strategy? If one were in the perpetual-motion machine business, taking a calm attitude towards haters would be pretty much the only option, since there would be no way to argue with them.
- marshray 15y ago
  ... and if he were not in the perpetual-motion machine business taking a calm attitude wouldn't be a bad idea either. So logically it's not a very informative data point. Nevertheless, I did watch him interviewed and give the real-time interactivity demo to an AU gamer mag a few months ago (I think it's still on Youtube). I know a bit about the traditional polygon rendering pipeline and I was quite impressed with his response to his critics. I'm reserving judgment since there are still big unanswered questions. But I would not expect him to be satisfying my curiosity with answers if his strategy is a legitimate attempt to develop the technology with a bigger partner (e.g. a console company or first-party studio).
  - unconed 15y ago
    As someone who knows more than 'a bit', I can tell you, it smells like snake oil from miles away. All the obvious signs are there: needlessly bashing existing tech, handwaving around very hard problems and demo videos that are staged to hide the obvious flaws from the untrained eye. Plus, they've been hyping up the same tech for years now, with very little progress. People keep throwing the same criticisms at them, and they keep delivering very unimpressive responses. If they've indeed scored $2 million of government grants already with this demo, as others allege, then it couldn't be more obvious: it's a zombie company designed to look impressive and leech off investor money, nothing more. It's centered around tech that has already been explored thoroughly by academia and industry, and we know where the practical problems lie in turning it into a viable game tech.

wladimir 15y ago

See also the gigavoxel research by an ex-colleague of mine: http://maverick.inria.fr/Members/Cyril.Crassin/ http://maverick.inria.fr/Members/Cyril.Crassin/ . This looks very similar, and is probably an extension of it...

babebridou 15y ago

What I don't like with "Unlimited Details" is that Dell refuses to say what the engine can't do yet. We know it's a work in progress. We (the internet) are excited about it because it's an experiment that's on scale with what we could expect from that branch of 3D graphics technology. Trillions of atoms, whatever. Show us what's still in progress because the internet is skeptical about this, this and this. Hacking reflexion by duplicating the scene is a good way to start, because no one can say whether it's a good or a bad solution to a non-trivial problem - it gets the job done for now - but can you have multiple coexisting versions of the world? like a vertical mirror, a horizontal body of water and an underwater section? To Dell: just stop handwaving the questions already, we get it that you ignored the state of the art and built your own thing, just tell us what it can't do yet, show us your current progress and you'll be met with much less skepticism, and even help, even if you keep your trade secrets, at least show us your specs! You won't be struck down by lightning if you talk - no one ever died from reinventing/copying the wheel and making it so good that the wheel can fly.

Torn 15y ago
> Dell refuses to say what the engine can't do yet. I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest it can't do real-time animation, texturing, lighting, shadows, collisions, etc. All the maps / screenshots shown seem to be static, procedurally generated and not artist-created. Dell keeps throwing around this 'Unlimited Detail' marketing phrase which is very offputting. Until it's seen in action in an actual game it can be nothing but snake oil.
- babebridou 15y ago
  I agree with you 100% - my comment was mostly wishful thinking, a description of how Dell could make me change my mind. This kind of marketing is one I can't quite understand. I mean, what is he after? Buzz? Funding? What's his endgame? Why & how is he paying people to work on it? Is his marketing strategy to troll the profession & the audience, and he really has something big up his sleeve? Why is he using the Vaporware approach?
  - 15y ago

nodata 15y ago

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2837948 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2837948 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840543 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840543

Causification 15y ago

The way the author posted the picture (used in a much earlier Euclideon article talking about how badly polygon engines render complex organic shapes) of a polygon tree and a PHOTOGRAPH of a real tree and passed it off as the Unlimited Detail Engine makes me question his bias. The way he used "Kuda" when talking about CUDA makes me question his technical competency. Until there's a demo I can download and run on my PC it's a load of baseless claims as far as I'm concerned.

darklajid 15y ago

Is something like "GPUs used to be fighting one another for more power, memory, and so forth, but now they have their languages like _Kuda_" (Page 6) just a random typo or a reason to believe that someone didn't do his homework before typing this down? I'd love to see this released, but the article was far too positive and the tone read too much like marketing to me. Some careful, not too aggressive words at the introduction and blessing after blessing afterwards, sprinkled with the seemingly unbiased author's impression and description of a very nice and professional guy. Mhhhh... Edit: Just saw that user 'Causification' already said something similar, albeit with a good amount of more emotion. Still, I'm going to keep this here as a personal impression of someone that has no clue about graphic engines in general, i.e. my layman's reaction after reading the article.

robinhouston 15y ago
Those of us who don’t keep showdead turned on can’t see what Causification has said, because he/she is hellbanned. I was quite confused by your comment, till I guessed what had happened and turned on showdead to check.

singular 15y ago

Whether or not a voxel engine is the right way go, or even whether it does what it claims to do, I think Dell should be commended for actually going out and trying to do the thing - it's an amazing achievement to actually get somewhere with it.

femto 15y ago

What do people make of the patent history? Eight lapsed applications and one withdrawn over a 15 year period. Is that unusual? http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/quickSearch.do?queryString=bruce+dell&resultsPerPage= http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/quickSearch.do...

forbes 15y ago

The awesome Aussie show 'Good Game' did a story on Unlimited Detail recently: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?src=/tv/goodgame/video/xml/20111108_2030.xml&item=05 http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?src=/tv/...

Derbasti 15y ago

As soon as I see animated objects moving about in a dynamically lit world, I will start to believe that Euclideon is on to something. Maybe there could be some middle ground like in the old voxel days, where you would have a static (unlimited detail) background world and some traditional, polygon-based actors in the foreground. Looking at any modern game, just about everything on the screen is constantly moving, so color me sceptical even on that idea. Also, I would like to know how they do lighting. It looks like they might use precomputed highlights and shadows. Needless to say that this would not be of much use for dynamic lighting.

wingerlang 15y ago
Not sure if you want to SEE it. But in the article it says they are doing just that. . "Dell shows me an as yet unreleased demo – not real-time in this case – that suggests Euclideon has already made some positive inroads in ensuring Unlimited Detail is compatible with existing middleware. The short video shows traditional polygon objects happily coexisting and interacting in the same space as a small Unlimited Detail environment"
epscylonb 15y ago
Collision detection is the big thing for me, sure you can fake it with invisible polygons but that usually leads to weirdness in the player experience.
dmbaggett 15y ago
This may not be as big an issue as you think. We had the same issue in in the Crash Bandicoot games: the background was rendered a completely different way than the foreground (animating) elements. We made it work by approximating where the foreground elements should "sort in" to the background polygon layers. Where the heuristics were wrong, we tuned it manually, by pushing a foreground element forward or backward in the scene until it looked right. Remember: you can hack stuff in games until it looks right. It doesn't actually have to work perfectly from a theoretical standpoint; it just has to work practically without too much additional tuning labor.
- 15y ago

dmbaggett 15y ago

The article sensationally positions this as some incredible breakthrough that the "old guard" of gaming is trying to suppress. More likely, the code works, but has limitations -- the same limitations that led old guard luminaries like Carmack to defer the idea for another few years. As others have pointed out, voxel-based games have been around for a long time; a recent example is the whimsical "3D Dot Game Hero" for PS3, in which they use the low-res nature of the voxel world as a fun design element. Voxel-based approaches have huge advantages ("infinite" detail, background details that are deformable at the pixel level, simpler simulation of particle-based phenomena like flowing water, etc.) but they'll only win once computing power reaches an important crossover point. That point is where rendering an organic world a voxel at a time looks better than rendering zillions of polygons to approximate an organic world. Furthermore, much of the effort that's gone into visually simulating real-world phenomena (read the last 30 years of Siggraph conference proceedings) will mostly have to be reapplied to voxel rendering. Simply put: lighting, caustics, organic elements like human faces and hair, etc. will have to be "figured out all over again" for the new era of voxel engines. It will therefore likely take a while for voxel approaches to produce results that look as good, even once the crossover point of level of detail is reached. I don't mean to take anything away from the hard and impressive coding work this team has done, but if they had more academic background, they'd know that much of what they've "pioneered" has been studied in tremendous detail for two decades. Hanan Samet's treatise on the subject tells you absolutely everything you need to know, and more: (http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Multidimensional-Structures-Kaufmann-Computer/dp/0123694469/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322140227&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Multidimensional-Structure...) and even goes into detail about the application of these spatial data structures to other areas like machine learning. Ultimately, Samet's book is all about the "curse of dimensionality" and how (and how much) data structures can help address it. In the late 90s at Naughty Dog, I used Samet's ideas (octrees in particular) for collision detection in the Crash Bandicoot games. In those games, the world was visually rendered with polygons, but physically modeled -- for collision detection purposes, at least -- with an octree. The nice thing about octrees is that they are very simple to work with and self-calibrate their resolution dynamically, making them very space-efficient. Intuitively, a big region of empty air tends to be represented by a handful of huge cubes, while the individual fronds of a fern get coated with dozens or hundreds of tiny cubes, because there's more surface detail to account for in the latter example. I think the crossover point I mentioned earlier will come when GPUs become general-purpose enough to allow massively parallel voxel rendering implementations. That's what surprised me most about this article: they crow that it's a CPU-only technology... why? GPUs excel at tasks involving vast amounts of relatively simple parallel computation. Prior to the crossover point, we'll see a bunch of cool games that use voxel rendering primarily for gameplay reasons. These games will look chunky compared to their polygonal peers, but will offer unique experiences. Minecraft is a good example. (I'm assuming it's voxel-based, but don't really know.)

Tloewald 15y ago

The fact they are financially backed by the Australian Government (which has an approximately 0% track record as a VC) seals their doom. If they were in the US they'd have to figure out a way to produce something commercial or at least potentially commercial, now they can burn through $2M while fading into irrelevance (if not there already).

sjm 15y ago

I'd really like to know how much memory is being used per unique model. Until we see more than a couple different models being re-used everywhere, I'm going to stay skeptical. Also his reasoning for the lack of variety of '3 weeks before Gamescom' sounds a bit BS to me, as this video has been around for much longer than Euclideon's last media-spree: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSvptZCJGyI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSvptZCJGyI. You would think they would have created at least one demo with a larger variety of objects by this point. I'm also very suspicious of all this recent positive coverage of Euclideon. There was a pretty suspect feature on Euclideon on an Australian game review show called Good Game a couple weeks back, talking with this same guy, and not really making much mention of the skepticism involved (or at all if I remember correctly), and as far as I know no outspoken skeptics have been able to get their hands on it. The clip from Good Game can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_ndZ8ETbqU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_ndZ8ETbqU

ldar15 15y ago

"... he was forced to solve the riddles himself, rather than plucking the accepted solution from a textbook ..." The thing is, the textbooks also have all the things that didn't work or don't work well. Even some educated graphics programmers often fail to understand that representing 3D objects is just a data representation and transformation problem. Sure, a hard one, but there's nothing magic about it. Representing the data as a bag of "atoms" instead of polygons just isn't a breakthrough. The problem is still spacial search. The problem is still a simulation of optical physics. Graphics is just an optimization problem now. Attend an IEEE conference and maybe 5% of papers will be new theory, the rest will be about effective optimization techniques. When someone comes to you and says "I have this awesome idea because I didn't read anybody else's ideas", just walk away.

tluyben2 15y ago

After reading all the comments it seems there are people who are playing with this kind of technology. Is there any open source code which can be studied?

meric 15y ago

There's supposed to be 42 trillion "voxels" in that demo. If each "voxel" took only a single bit to store, this works out to require [42 trillion / (1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8) = 4 889.44352] gigabytes of memory. How do you store that while you calculate the screen pixels? Modern PCs only have 4 or 8 gigabytes of RAM!

jpadvo 15y ago
This is addressed in the article: they used many replicated objects. They stored one rock, then rendered it a gajillion times. They claim they were able to do this by applying something like a search algorithm to the objects being rendered. That's the magic of it -- they are able to create worlds with insane amounts of detail, but in an intelligent way that means they don't need an insane amount of computational power to render it.

mkramlich 15y ago

Voxel engines are "new" in the same sense that social networks are "new" from the POV of someone who remembers using modem-based BBSes and Unix Usenet groups back in the 80's. Meaning: mostly old, maybe new in some small subtle corner aspect of it, or some twist. But not really new.

rkalla 15y ago

I am surprisd by the lack of interest in the search algorithm Dell proposes he designed and is using. Searching such a large problem space for 1 to 2 million results 25x a second is amazingly impressive... This is what i am most curious about at the moment... Also how he is storing the full voxel point data for any given world that needs to be searchd in real time. Replicated data or not (i.e. similar to GIF color data deduplication) you still have location data for every voxel position or offsets or something that still results in a hellacious amount of data that needs to be searched efficiently. Havent seen details from Dell or others on either of these aspects that I feel are cornerstones to the engine.

buff-a 15y ago
Its hierarchical data, most nodes of which are empty at the highest level, or 100% solid, terminating the search. Its basically a specific optimization of raytracing as far as I can tell.

argimenes 15y ago

If this software is a hoax -- and fair enough, it sounds too good to be true -- can someone explain how they were able to fake it in the live demo? I understand that this is supposed to be impossible, cranks often claim the establishment is 'suppressing' them, etc., etc., but if this snake oil peddling, then HOW did they do it? The demo LOOKS real.